Video Paywalls, Mobile Momentum, Optimizing Views & More

This week the Reel Web covers a lot of topics including YouTube’s venture into providing premium content, the stats on video sharing apps on mobile devices as well as a couple quick resources on monetizing your videos and looking at your video analytics.

YouTube Planning Premium Content Subscription – YouPayWall?

YouTube may be bringing in some premium content that will be available to view with a subscription. Most of this content will likely be very popular on-demand content that is currently available via TV, however, there is speculation that this may lead to YouTube providing paid content to live events such as sporting events. There are currently channels that YouTube is streaming live events overseas, but despite rumors of other platforms providing this (including the iPanel from Apple), we have yet to see this provided here in America.

Mobile Apps Increasing Video Viewing Time

Over the last year apps on mobile devices have gained amazing momentum. Specifically the photography and video apps are one of the fastest growing categories across all mobile devices. A study was done showing that July 2011 the average person was only spending about 87 minutes a month utilizing the video mobile applications, but that has since grown to 231 minutes as of May 2012. This may or may not be affecting views to YouTube. According to research graphs shown it looks as if YouTube is losing some viewership to these applications, however, this may also just be a reflection of the change of the season. With summer upon us viewers are more likely to be outside and viewing content from their mobile devices as opposed to watching videos in front of the computer. It would be interesting to re-look at the numbers in the fall to see if YouTube views are still declining or if they gain momentum again with the start of the school year.

Videos Slowly Becoming Longer

Last week a study came out from ComScore that tells us the average length of an online video is increasing by about 12 seconds per month. The current average length is at 6 minutes and 24 seconds. If the trend continues, by March of 2013 the average online video will be 7 minutes and 26 second long. It doesn’t necessarily mean that people are becoming more and more used to watching online content in long form, although that may be one implication, but it does mean that content providers are putting longer form content online in the hopes that viewers will watch the entire video.

Personal Engagement Necessary for Online Video

In a recent video by the CEO of an app called Majesto. He states, “Social video is, we think is not just about being able to just share videos with their friends. People have been able to do that for years for their YouTube videos for instance. We think that social video is more about social content, which means content which is extremely relevant to your social network. And this has to be personal.” While consistent content and high production value is good for online video, it is a good reminder that one of the most important things for a successful channel is to have good viewer engagement and to keep both the content and our interaction with our viewers on a personal level.

Vzaar Paywall Let’s You Monetize Video Without Advertisements

If you are looking for a way to monetize your videos without utilizing advertisements, Vzaar offers solutions geared to assist you in placing paywalls on your videos. While this may not be a great solution or all content you provide, in some cases this is a nice alternative to advertisements running during your video.

Optimizing Your Video Views

Analyzing your videos is essential to figuring out better ways to provide content and when. While this can be really confusing at times, we’ve provided some answers to hopefully take some of the mystery out of looking at your video analytics and help you to get a better understanding of the three phase that every video goes through in order to help you make better decisions on monetization of the content.

On this week’s look at the Reel Web, we’re going to talk about a lot of different things including how YouTube might be charging us for some premium content. Also we’re going to look at how maybe some video sharing apps and things for mobile devices might be challenging YouTube’s dominance in the online video world and the length of time that people are spending watching online videos is increasingly growing. We’re going to talk about that and much more this week on the Reel Web.

Hey guys my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of the Reel Web where every week we just highlight some of the online video news for you guys from the week before.

First of all, it looks like YouTube might be bringing in some premium content that might be available for a subscription fee that you and I can pay to subscribe to pay to certain channels of content. As you might expect some of that will include very popular and high demand video content from TV, but we’re also hoping that maybe it will bring live streaming events such as sporting events which is really kind of what’s keeping a lot of people from cutting the cable from cable TV or satellite or just going online is a lot of our sports stuff is not available live streaming online yet, but if YouTube can pull this off, that might be the final clincher for a lot of different people.

There’s speculation that the new iPanel from the TV that’s coming supposedly from Apple that’s kind of rumored, there’s rumors that maybe they might be also be able to pull this off in offering live sporting events to stream over the internet to their iPanel TV things. But so far all this is a speculation. No one really knows for sure, except YouTube has proven that they can live stream sporting events in other countries such as cricket and some other channels that most of us here in America probably aren’t too familiar with, but it’s definitely happening overseas so if YouTube can pull that off here, some of that might be available for a fee.

And why are they charging for it you might ask? Well it’s because, well one, YouTube’s probably going to have to pay out the butt to get this stuff on YouTube in the first place, but two, and I think this is more important, advertisers are probably a little shy in sponsoring content that we kind of just have right now on YouTube. A lot of amateur stuff, a lot of people making just videos like this, but they are more likely to want to brand their products and their services against professional content that they see is a high quality Hollywood stuff and TV shows and things, they feel more comfortable with that. So I think if YouTube can pull this off it would probably be good for all of us in the long run, definitely good for YouTube, they’ll be making a lot more money but it will also be helping a lot more advertisers make that switch to online video and then hopefully that spills over to the rest of us eventually and we’ll just see where it all goes. But I think that’s interesting. Links more about that are below.

Something very interesting is happening with mobile apps that revolve around photography and video. Over the past year, they have been getting tremendous momentum. Over time these apps are getting millions of users, and according to researcher done by flurry, they are easily the number one fastest growing category of apps across all mobile devices. Just back in July 2011 the average person was spending only 87 minutes a month on these mobile video applications but now in May of 2012 so far it is up to 231 minutes the average user is spending on these applications every month. And we can say, hey that’s cool! People are getting more used to doing online video, especially on their phones and that will probably translate to more views for us, but does it? This graph shows that the average number of minutes a user is spending on YouTube has actually declined while the mobile video sharing applications, their minutes are beginning to go up. Does that mean that we’re losing our views? I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. I look at this and my first reaction is, man it really appears that YouTube is going down, video apps are going up and so there might be some competition there, but you also gotta remember that throughout the summer views on YouTube are just kind of down across the board. We always kind of go into the summer and kids are home from college and they’re working. And people aren’t sitting in front of the computers doing homework as much anymore so views on YouTube generally just go down over the summer and then when kids go back into school you can expect them to start going up again. So maybe what this graph is showing is just part of the normal course that YouTube takes. It would be interesting to see where we were this time last year where the graph doesn’t show, what did last May look like and I’m willing to guess based on what I see on this graph just so far is that we are probably doing way better now this May then we were doing back in May 2011 as far as views are concerned, so take it with a grain of salt, but I would love to hear from you guys. What do you think of these mobile video sharing apps, especially Vidi and Social Cam, the two big major players but all of them in general. Do you think that they might challenge our views on YouTube and might compete for the people we’re trying to get to subscribe for us or do you think they actually could be a helpful extension of what we do here on YouTube in some way. I’d love to hear from you guys.

Also last week a study came out from ComScore that tells us the average length of an online video is increasing by about 12 seconds per month. Right now the average length of an online video is 6 minutes and 24 seconds, which means that just within the past 6 months the average online video length has increased by almost a minute, 54 seconds. That means by March of 2013 the average online video will be 7 minutes and 26 second long. It doesn’t mean that people are becoming more and more used to watching online content in long form, although I think that might be an implication of it. It just means that we are putting longer and longer form content stuff on the internet and I guess people are watching it otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.

I know the average length of one of our Reel Web videos is about 8, 9 minutes or so. If you’re willing to watch an 8 or 9 minute video from us maybe some other people are willing to watch an 8 or 9 minute video from you.

Couple things I want to cover for you guys really quick and if any of these spark any interest in you, you want to find out more, there’s always links below this video here on YouTube or on ReeSEO.com so go check them out. For the first thing is, somebody said something I thought was really, really interesting. It’s the CEO of an app called Majesto. I watched a video interview with him and he said this.

“Social video is, we think is not just about being able to just share videos with their friends. People have been able to do that for years for their YouTube videos for instance. We think that social video is more about social content, which means content which is extremely relevant to your social network. And this has to be personal.”

I love the emphasis that he puts there on it has to be personal. Cause it really does. A lot of focus on really high production value and we focus a lot on just consistent content and we focus a lot on just lots of different things, engagement, and all of those things are super important. We should and need to focus on those things, but let’s not forget the personal aspect that people watch YouTube, hopefully, most of us anyway, because we want to have like – we want to perceive any – feel like we have a connection with the person that we’re watching. We want to feel like if we type a comment the person will actually see it.

The personal engagement part is really important, but just being personal in your videos is really important as well. Or if you’re not in your videos maybe as a live Hangout On Air now on Google Hangouts. One of these times I’m going to do my shoot here live on Google+ and here on YouTube so if you’re not already circling us here on ReelSEO you might want to do that below. The main point, remember to be personable in your videos and help make that personal connection.

Also there’s a link down there if you are creating any type of video content that you want to monetize, differently then advertising. Let’s say that you’re making some premium content that you kind of want to put behind a wall that instead of having advertising on it, people can just pay to watch your video. Maybe pay $.99 and stream it online once. Some of us have the ability to rent videos through

YouTube, but they seem to be strict about how to use that and what that looks like. There’s a service called Vzaar that is actually is geared to do this very thing specifically for you in your video content so if that’s a monetization structure that you’re looking to get into or can use, the link about that is below. We write a little bit about that on ReelSEO and give a little overview about that so go check that out.

Also, we tell you guys here at ReelSEO a lot to analyze the analytics surrounding your video and learn from them so that you can make better content going forward in the future but a lot of us look at that and we say I see the stats but I don’t know what to do with this information. Well we have a post linked up for you guys below from us here at ReelSEO.com that will help you to know how to analyze that data and what to do with it, decisions to make and actually takes you through three phases that every video goes through so that when you look at your stats you kind of know what’s happening and how to make adjustments and what to learn from that so that is below, that’s definitely something you’ll want to read.

And finally we also have a link down there for those of you guys who are trying to do online video marketing for business to business stuff and that seems to be like a different ballgame then what sometimes we talk about here on ReelSEO – not always a lot of the same stuff applies but if you want to read an article that will give you five really good tips for how to do really good solid business to business video marketing and how to do that, that is linked up below so if that is your niche go check that one out too.

For our Creator’s Tip video on Thursday, we’re actually going to have a very special guest with us. His name is Nathan and he runs a very big popular website and we’re going to talk with him about how he uses online video to engage the millions of people on his website and how he uses that to really promote his website and cross pollinate and all that kind of stuff, so that’s coming up on Thursday.

If you’re not already subscribed to our channel and would love to see that video and all the other awesome stuff we’re trying to do for you guys here at ReelSEO, just click that subscribe button above this video here on YouTube. We’d love to have you join us every week and that would be awesome guys. We’d love to have you hang out with us. So I will see you guys on Thursday for that interview and then again next week for our look at the Reel Web. Bye!

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